Video Tutorial

Step by Step Tutorial

1

The easiest way to start using OpenVPN with hide.me is using these commands in the terminal, while making appropriate changes to the username, password and name of the configuration file you use. Please note that you have to download the Linux configuration file prior to using these commands:

3

Click on "Linux" link, and download the zip file. Now you need to extract the file and place it in the preferred location, which is /etc/openvpn/, and that location will be used in the remainder of this guide. You can do this by simply typing:

sudo unzip ~/Downloads/US-East.zip -d /etc/openvpn/

4

Next, you need to connect using the current configuration file, and you'll be asked for our credentials.Since sudo elevation that requires you to input your credentials and putting the process into the background in the same line doesn't work, this is the recommended connection method if you want to manually type in your username and password:

sudo openvpn --config /etc/openvpn/US-East.ovpn

Now press Ctrl+z

bg
disown -h

This invokes elevation and at the same time connects to the desired VPN destination, but it does so in the foreground. Ctrl+z suspends the foreground process. bg resumes suspended process and sends it to the background. disown -h makes it so the process isn’t killed when the terminal is shut down.

If you want an automatic login when you start the OpenVPN connection, you need to make the required changes to configuration files:

**Note: tls-version-min is a security enhancement. If you would like to have it in this version of Ubuntu, you will have to compile newest version of OpenVPN client from source

Now you can initiate your VPN connection

sudo openvpn --config /etc/openvpn/US-East.ovpn

This will start the connection in the foreground. If you want to start the connection in the background and also make it not terminate on exiting the terminal you should use this command instead:

sudo nohup openvpn --config /etc/openvpn/US-East.ovpn &

Terminating the connection is as easy as typing:

sudo killall openvpn

Notice, that sometimes, you will be left with the terminated process in the process list and when you log out you will get a warning message "You have stopped jobs". Just ignore it, and log-out once more, this will kill the stopped job.

5

Setting up automatic OpenVPN connection on system start*This step requires that you setup automatic logon from the previous step.
Using your favorite text editor create the following file (mine is vi, but you could use nano, pico, joe or gedit)

sudo vi /etc/default/openvpn

Above the line that says:

#AUTOSTART="all"

Type

AUTOSTART="US-East"

Since /etc/init.d/openvpn script that is responsible for automatic startup of OpenVPN client searches in /etc/openvpn/ for configuration files with .conf extension we have to rename out US-East.ovpn to US-East.conf

A software firewall running on the OpenVPN server machine itself is filtering incoming connections on port 1194 (hide.me:4000-4100). Be aware that many OSes will block incoming connections by default, unless configured otherwise.

A NAT gateway on the server's network does not have a port forward rule for TCP/UDP 1194 (hide.me:4000-4100) to the internal address of the OpenVPN server machine.

The OpenVPN client config does not have the correct server address in its config file. The remote directive in the client config file must point to either the server itself or the public IP address of the server network's gateway.